The present invention refers to a process for preparing pimiento paste shaped into balls to be used for stuffing table olives.
Olives stuffed with pimiento are a very well-known commercial product. The primitive technology for producing them basically required pitting the olives to leave a cavity in their center. This cavity is stuffed with a piece of natural pimiento. The piece was usually rectangular, flat and would have a thickness that principally depended on the size of the green olive and cavity left therein when removing the pit from it. However, this technique caused a great waste of pimiento since the pieces of pimiento had to be of a relatively particular size and shape in order to be inserted neatly and compactly into the cavity of the olive. Furthermore, this technique was labor-intensive with the resultant increases in production costs, as well as excessive hand contact with the products handled in the operations of gathering the strips of pimiento folded in two and then inserting them into the pitted olives.
To solve these difficulties, a method was later developed to produce pimiento paste in the form of a ribbon that could be used in automatic olive-stuffing machines. This method basically consisted of macerating the natural pimiento, for example, by mincing it until the particle size formed a dispersion in an aqueous medium that contained alginic acid (or a salt thereof suitable for ingestion) and guar gum. The dispersion is suitably shaped to be inserted into a pitted olive and, preferably, to be used in a conventional automatic stuffing machine, although the shaped dispersion may be later cut for this purpose. The dispersion is placed in contact with a solidifying solution of a water-soluble compound suitable for ingestion having a bivalent cation, preferably calcium chloride, whereby the alginic acid gels irreversibly to form reconstituted pimiento that retains its shape. This solidification procedure establishes the properties required for manipulating and stuffing with automatic stuffing machines.
The shaping and mincing operations may be carried out by transferring this dense homogeneous dispersion to a conveyor belt that travels semisubmerged through a channel containing a solution of calcium chloride. Once the belt has completed its course, the resulting wide ribbon of pimiento continues to thicken as it floats along the channel and is picked up at the end of it by another conveyor belt. The solidified mass then moves on to the cutting operation in cutting devices to give the ribbon of pimiento the desired width and length and is then stored until it is directly used to stuff olives.
Generally, this latter technique is the one that is being used today to stuff olives with pimiento paste with good results but also with certain difficulties arising principally from the inelegant manipulation of the ribbon of pimiento paste and the relatively slow rate at which the olives are stuffed.